Prudentia

A conversation with ChatGPT. Great scientists and philosophers like Einstein or Kant are often attributed very high IQ scores by the media. Do you think that this is justified? Have these intellectuals made their achievements primarily because of their high IQ or because of other talents? For instance, I'm not sure if you really need an exceptionally high IQ to be an original thinker.  I think your intuition is largely correct. The very high IQ scores retrospectively assigned to Einstein, Kant, Newton, Goethe, etc. are usually much less scientifically meaningful than they appear. And even if we knew that someone had an IQ of 160+, it would not by itself explain why that person became an Einstein or Kant. 1. The famous IQ numbers are mostly speculative Einstein never took a modern IQ test, as far as we know. Consequently, claims such as “Einstein had an IQ of 160” are essentially retroactive estimates . The same applies to Kant, Newton, Leonardo da Vinci and many other historica...

Step Zero: Toward Human Flourishing Meaning of Life What if, while reading the lines below, you granted me a temporary suspension of judgment, so that I might demonstrate that the “meaning of life,” contrary to what prevailing opinion tends to suppose, is in fact one of the most evident things there is? 1 — ANALYZING A HUMAN LIFE AS AN OBJECT In order to discover the meaning of our own life, we must first learn to analyze a human life as an object of knowledge. A human life, however, can only be examined in its entirety when contemplated from birth to death. Only then does it become possible to observe its resultant: what that existence effectively became once the whole of its trajectory had been completed. As long as the individual remains alive, his story remains open. A new action may still confirm, modify, contradict, or even redeem everything he has previously done. For this reason, at this first stage, our own life cannot be regarded as a completed totality. We must therefore beg...

Intelligence is not the same thing as education, but rather a requirement for it. The original intelligence test developers had in mind the selection of children who would do well at school and children who would not. For this reason it is quite controversial if a person who was a bad student takes pride in having a high IQ, as some people I met in other high intelligence societies do. In the world's largest high intelligence society, I got to know several people who were intelligent but poorly educated and had no interest in the acquisition of knowledge. What was especially problematic is that they were intolerant of people like me who had a different attitude; they hated me for successfully completing several university degrees. For this reason I stated that I was mainly looking for university graduates when I founded Prudentia. However, I am well aware that you can also acquire knowledge through autodidact learning. That is why I do not limit membership to university graduates. ...

Einstein was an average student and wasn't admitted to doctoral studies after completing his Bachelor's degree. Then came annus mirabilis, in which he wrote five groundbreaking papers. These papers were published even though he was an independent scholar without a PhD degree at that time. The question is: If somebody like Einstein lived today, would he get published? I can talk of my own experience: I was an independent scholar with an MD and an MSc degree when I wrote my paper "Symbiont Conversion Theory", which described a novel idea how to solve the problem of antimicrobial resistance, one of the most pressing problems in clinical medicine. It took a whole seven years until I found a scientific journal that was willing to publish my paper! So I think the reason why there hasn't been a second Einstein yet is also the publishing system. A person of Einstein's genius and without the required academic credentials and connections will have a hard time getting hi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Cyborg - This 2004 book written by James Hughes provides an overview of future technologies related to medicine which mostly still belong to the realm of utopia now, more than twenty years later. As I wrote in https://prudentia-club.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-misery-of-transhumanism.html there has been little progress in implementing these ideas. But as you can read in https://prudentia-club.blogspot.com/2024/10/longevity-medicine-state-of-art-2024.html longevity medicine has developed a little since Aubrey de Grey published his “strategies for engineered negligible senescence” (SENS) in 2005. From "Citizen Cyborg": <<In 1977, Rifkin went on to start his think tank, the Foundation on Economic Trends, dedicated to throw ing roadblocks in the way of biotech. Rifkin named his nemesis algeny, “the improvement of existing organisms and the design of wholly new ones with the intent of perfecting their performance.” But, for Rifkin, algen...

I've recently read some issues of Noesis, the journal of the Mega Society, available at https://megasociety.org/#noesis . My impression: The level is approximately the same as that of Telicom, the journal of the ISPE. But: While the ISPE requires a minimum IQ of 146, the Mega Society requires 172. That makes me believe that 146 is enough to ensure high intellectual standards and it doesn't make sense to be more selective than that. Therefore I think that the IQ requirement of Prudentia, which is 140, is a good one. Prudentia has the potential to become a high-quality intellectual society just like the ISPE. In fact, Prudentia is already one of the most active high intelligence societies for the time being. Claus D. Volko